Andy Baio, aka @waxpancake, made his 4 years old play through the entire videogame history in chronological order in less than 4 years.
Baio is an indie video game enthusiast, founder of the XOXO conference and the creator of built Upcoming, Belong, Playfic and Supercut. He wanted to cease the opportunity of being a parent to perform social experiments on his kid! Of course, the mother vetoed out most of Baio's experiments, but he managed to carry one on: What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order?
Andy's son, Eliot was born in 2004, the year of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and the launch of the Nintendo DS. Once he reached 4 years, his father introduced him to "a Pac-Man plug-and-play TV game loaded with arcade classics — Galaxian (1979), Rally-X (1980), Bosconian (1981), Dig Dug (1982), and of course, Pac-Man (1980) and three sequels, Super Pac-Man (1982), Pac-Man Plus (1982), and Pac & Pal (1983)."
A few weeks later, the duo moved on to Atari 2600 games then to NES before Eliot was four and half years old. By the age of six, Eliot was able to beat Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 1-3, Mega Man 1–6, Castlevania 1–3, Rygar, Contra, and Duck Tales. It was time for the next upgrade.
The kid moved on to Super NES and N64 and by the time he turned seven, Eliot had collected every star in Super Mario 64. After that, he skipped ahead to PlayStation 2 where he concluded the experiment by playing through games such as ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and the original Katamari Damacy.
This unique experience had a profound impact on Eliot's gaming preferences. It made him less susceptible to flashy graphics and more interested in gameplay. It also made him pick a taste for brutally hard games such as Spelunky, VVVVVV, FTL, Cave Story and Nuclear Throne. In fact, he is probably the youngest player to ever reach hell in Spelunky and beat it.
"To complete Spelunky, you just have to survive 15 randomly generated levels and then trick the final boss into killing itself. To get to hell, though, you have to perform a series of specific rituals in a specific order, using unique objects that crop up in different places each time, and then defeat the boss in a particularly audacious way to use his death as a stepping stone to the underworld."
